Running Girl is a book by Simon Mason about a teenage boy named Garvie Smith, who, despite having the highest IQ ever recorded at his school, is lazy, wags, drinks alcohol, smokes and has terrible grades. He is often just daydreaming and lying on his bed, until the body of his ex-girlfriend, Chloe Dow is pulled out of a pond nearby and he is instantly woken.
Despite there already being an Detective Inspector on the case, Garvie starts investigating for himself. He does a lot of sleuthing, disguising, rule breaking, interrupting with official business, and takes many dangerous risks to find out that Chloe was being bothered by many people, and that she hadn't been the innocent beautiful girl the media was portraying her as. But as Garvie gets more and more involved, things get more and more risky and dangerous.
I found this book very engaging and enjoyable. The way it was written was easy to read, and there were many twists and turns in the plot where I thought that was the end of it but it turned out it wasn't. I liked how Garvie was not school-smart but was extremely intelligent in a whole other way. This book wasn't just a typical murder mystery, it had a unique plot based not around the life of an adult, but a teen, in a more modern setting. It showed the different lives of different teens who had grown up in different ways, which was one of the main things that made it interesting for me.
I would recommend this book to high school and intermediate students, not primary school students, because it involves a lot of smoking, violence and gambling, as well as ideas that younger readers might find harder to understand. Also it would be more relatable to teens than it would be to 5-11 year olds or adults.
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